White Noise
by ilarual
Summary: They say you never get a second chance at a first impression, but when a battle gone wrong leaves Soul without any memories of himself, his friends, or even his beloved meister, Maka discovers that that's probably for the best.


**A/N-** I received a "Remember Me" prompt on Tumblr, which of course lends itself to amnesia fic- something I will always have a soft spot for. I was going to do amnesiac!Maka, but that's been done before... at least two times done very very well, I might add. As far as I know, however, no one's ever done amnesiac!Soul, hence the direction I'm taking this.

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**Prologue**

The first thing he became aware of was a beeping noise, a soft high-pitched tone that sounded in slow, regular intervals. He pondered the sound for a time, counting the beeps and measuring the space between. Eventually, he became conscious of the fact that he had a body. Perhaps he should have been more worried about the fact that he hadn't felt it or remembered to be concerned about that earlier, but he was too uncomfortable to be concerned about that for the moment. He wasn't exactly in pain, per se, and as far as he could tell nothing seemed to be damaged, but his whole body felt sore and bruised as if he'd been suffering from a high fever.

Actually, never mind- he was in pain after all. As sensation began to return in earnest, he became aware of an unpleasant headache, not the stabbing kind that pulses with every heartbeat but rather a constant dull ache that ebbed and returned in slow waves. His mouth was cottony and tasted oddly metallic- like blood, he thought. It made him feel far more nauseated than the headache had managed to do.

Eventually it occurred to him that he ought to open his eyes. The inside of his eyelids gleamed red, and he supposed that meant it was daytime. He shouldn't be sleeping through the day, he had to-

He had to…?

Well, there was probably something he had to do, even if he couldn't remember what exactly that was at the moment. Getting up was a good idea regardless.

His eyelids felt crusty and hard to move, but he managed to get his eyes open nonetheless. Immediately he regretted it. The cackling sun was setting outside the window, and the last bright rays were coming in at just the right angle to shine directly into his sensitive eyes.

The headache he'd been feeling immediately tripled at the sudden onslaught of stimulation, and his stomach lurched. He wrenched himself upright with stiff and protesting limbs and leaned over the side of the bed just in time to vomit thick black liquid all over the floor. He choked at the bitter taste of blood and bile flooding his mouth.

Once he had finally coughed up every single ounce of the former contents of his stomach, his rigid muscles turned to jelly and he collapsed against the plastic railing that lined the bed. Dizzily, he recognized that the railing meant he must be in a hospital bed, which wasn't too surprising at the moment. However, he was too busy trying not to be sick again to think very much about it.

A vague-sounding woman's voice sounded from the doorway: "Oh, you're awake."

He turned his head slightly to look in the direction of the voice; the bones in his wrist dug into the skin of his cheek painfully, but he felt too drained to care.

Standing just inside the door was a young woman who looked to be about sixteen or seventeen, dressed down in pink scrubs. Her eyes were large, amber, and dreamy, and her short auburn hair was pulled up in a comically tiny ponytail on the side of her head. "You got sick?" she asked, in the same dazed tone. "I'd better go get Miss- uh… Miss… Miss Nygus!"

She turned and walked away, leaving him slightly baffled. Weird nurse.

He didn't have the mental energy to think about it, though, so he just focused on breathing for a few minutes, and on not smelling whatever vile stuff he'd puked up.

When the girl returned, she was pushing a mop bucket and accompanied by a tall black woman, also dressed in scrubs. From the bandages covering the exposed parts of her arms and a good bit of her face, he would have thought she should be a patient rather than a caregiver, but she was carrying a clipboard and looked like she knew what she was doing. She looked over the mess on the floor and sighed.

"You'd better clean that up, Meme," she instructed the girl. "Use the mop, not your hands."

The girl- Meme- did as instructed, soaking up the spatter of black sick on the floor with methodical diligence. Meanwhile the doctor or head nurse or whoever she was approached him and helped him lay back onto the mattress.

"How are you feeling, Soul?" she asked, voice very slightly muffled by her bandages.

Soul… that was probably him, right? She said it like it was him.

"Like a million bucks," he muttered, voice hoarse and throat raw from vomiting.

Why couldn't he remember his own name? That wasn't right. Who was he? Why was he in the hospital? Where was his family- wait, did he even have a family? He legitimately didn't know and he was pretty sure he should be panicking right about now.

The lady doctor, however, didn't seem to notice that anything was wrong, because she grinned- or at least, he gathered from the way her striking blue eyes crinkled up at the corners that she was grinning. It was hard to tell with the bandages wrapped around the lower portion of her face. "You don't change," she said with a shake of her head.

She spent a few minutes poking at him, checking his temperature, his vitals, his reflexes, using a little pen-light to check the dilation of his pupils. She prodded around his gut, which he objected to strenuously for fear that she'd upset the delicate balance he had struck between puking and not-puking. However, after a thorough examination and a bombardment of questions he only half-understood because it all sounded like jargon, she seemed satisfied that he wasn't about to drop dead on the spot.

"Looks like everything's getting back to normal," she said. "Dr. Stein was pretty stumped, because there was nothing physically wrong with you but your pulse was going haywire and you wouldn't wake up. He figured it was the black blood acting up again but we couldn't tell for sure. Even Maka couldn't catch onto your wavelength enough to break through to you while you were out."

Dr. Stein? Maka? What the hell was she talking about- wavelength?

"Well, do you feel up to some visitors? Your friends have been worried about you."

Friends. He had friends. Who were worried about him. He shouldn't let them keep worrying, right? "Uh…"

"I'll go get them," she said with another kind smile, turning away to step out into the hall. "They've been waiting in shifts around the clock so that someone would be here whenever you woke up."

Wow. He must have some pretty great friends. It would be really fucking nice if he could remember anything about them…

At some point during his interrogation-slash-examination, Meme had finished mopping up and pushed her little yellow bucket back out of the ward, and Soul felt it was safe to look around without risking seeing something that would make him sick to his stomach all over again. It looked like a pretty typical hospital ward. There were a few more beds down the length of the room, each with one of those curtains that could be pulled out from the wall to surround the whole bed in a little separate cubicle for privacy. However, at the moment, all of the curtains were pulled back and the other beds were unoccupied.

"Must be a slow day in the ICU," he muttered to himself. He wasn't sure if he actually was in the ICU- or for that matter how he could remember what ICU stood for but not his own name- but he figured that if he'd been unconscious long enough to warrant people taking turns waiting for him to wake up, that probably justified intensive care.

Not long after coming to this conclusion, the woman reappeared, leading a small group of people behind her. "-e's a little out of it still, so don't tire him out too much. That means you, Black*Star."

"Yeah, yeah, shaddup, my boy Soul needs his rest, I get it," replied a heavily muscled young man whose hair was dyed an eye-searing shade of turquoise.

He was accompanied by a tall, gorgeously curvy Asian woman with Pacific-blue eyes and a gentle smile. Following close behind her was a petite girl with mussed ash-blonde hair and dark circles beneath her drooping green eyes.

"Soul! My man! Are you feeling better now that your god is here?" the blue-haired guy exclaimed.

What the hell? He didn't know how to even begin to explain that he had no idea what the hell was going on, who they were, who he was-!

The little blonde, who had been rubbing sleepily at her eyes when she came in, suddenly pushed past the chick with the boobs and hurried to his side. "I'm so glad you're awake!" she said, grabbing his hand eagerly.

"Uh-"

"I've been so worried, Soul. And I'm really really sorry about what I said before, okay? I was afraid and I was just being stupid and I…" She let out a tiny little choked laugh. "I'm sorry, I'm babbling. You just woke up, you probably don't want to hear this now. We'll talk about it later."

The taller girl fixed those big blue eyes and her soft smile on him over the blonde's head. "I'm glad to see you awake as well, Soul. Are you feeling alright?"

He stared at them all, with their bright smiles and eager eyes, waiting for him to say something. His tongue felt heavy as lead, and it had nothing to do with the fact that his mouth was dry and still tasted like stomach acid.

"Soul?" the blonde asked, concern in her gaze.

"Um… I… Look, I'm sorry, guys, but I'm kind of having trouble with… I don't really… know who you are?" he stuttered out.

Four pairs of eyes stared at him with varying combinations of shock, disbelief, and confusion.

"You don't… know who I am?" Of all of them, the blonde looked the most devastated, and he immediately felt awful for not knowing her.

He shrugged and avoided her gaze. "I'm not totally sure who I am, so…"

The blue-haired boy summed it up nicely when he blurted out, "Oh shit."

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**A/N part deux-** I likely will not continue this until after SoMa Week (which, by the way, is less than two weeks away so if you're participating, now's the time to get on that!), but I wanted to get the prologue out to whet people's appetites.


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